If, after a transaction, the hotel needs to do something like refund part or all of the charge (e.g. returning a deposit), it would seem like they should be able to do that with just the transaction ID. Is there something I'm missing?

The fact that VISA/Mastercard/etc (or by proxy, most payment processors) provide no way to do that.

Why do they need to retain the info?

When the customer inquires about a charge, they don't/can't/won't have a transaction identifier. There is no transaction identifier issued by a card provider, just an approval and authorization code.

If you upgrade to the new Total Recall (TM) solution, you'll have 95% confidence in what you remember.

Too bad that isn't how they ruled in QUALITY KING DISTRIBUTORS, INC. v. L’ANZARESEARCH INT’L.

Held: The first sale doctrine endorsed in 109(a) is applicable to imported copies. Pp. 3—18. ...
(b) The statutory language clearly demonstrates that the right granted by 602(a) is subject to 109(a).

See USC TITLE 17 > CHAPTER 6 > 602 (a) (3) (B). That is not an infringement.

Let me know when you find the Christian word for Jihad.

I don't think any /. readers will be affected.

Optimistically, now's the best window of downtime they'll have in years to upgrade the air traffic control systems!

In the case of government run health care the government raises taxes after it treats people who are sick.

Fixed that for you.

How about someone with much higher credibility?

"If you can't trust the Governments of the world, who can you trust?"
- Albert Einstein (Young Einstein)

especially considering the recently confirmed rumor of an Apple tablet

Confirmed by whom? The rumor mills that run on dry water?

Say, "Ahaaah! As you re-plug in the router."

With your feet? You ARE talented!

I still marvel at the fact that we can scratch a bunch of tiny lines onto a chunk of sand, connect lots of other wires to it, push electrons around billions of times every second to trip lots of tiny switches and cause the contraption to accept human input and output something intelligible (and we can actually carry them around too). And I don't even think I'm old-fashioned.

A Patriot missile travels at about Mach 3 (~1000 m/sec) so a rounding error of 0.05, even without any error accumulation, means you'd be off by 50m in position.

Perhaps the tracking radar has a 500m field of view at a range of X km (enough distance to launch a Patriot missile). It doesn't look at the target through a keyhole and just has to be in the general vicinity to detect/confirm the incoming Scud.

How about if you realized that there are two systems in this story?
1) Radar (0.1 s accuracy)
2) Patriot missile (launched after target confirmation by Radar)

The article/summary states: The radar looked in the wrong place to receive a confirmation.
The radar had the 0.1s accuracy, not the Patriot missile that had to hit the 3m target that was never launched due to the radar defect.